Creating new ideas through deconstructing existing techniques

We are a design studio that stands out as being different from most. This is not because we strive to do so for the sake of it. We are different because we seek to innovate with dressmaking techniques. For us, the design cycle is not driven not by fabric swatches and mood boards. Our obsession is driven by the many challenges that we set ourselves. Over the past few seasons the challenge we strove to beat was to create the most effective body-con dresses ever created.

We were drawn to body-con because of our desire to give women an alternative to bandage dresses and optical illusion dresses. Both of these look great on women with model figures but can actually have the opposite effect on everyone else.

As a creators, the beauty of woman is firmly placed at our centre. We also tend to lean towards brutal honesty, which is often turned inwards. These two elements can only lead us to despair at the state of body-con, which we likened to the Emperors New Clothes. Compressing a body against a flat fabric will not bring out the best in most of us. That is why our first solution was to compress with texture. It didn’t take a genius to work out that texture is more flattering and forgiving against the body. It was our belief that we had created the best body-con dresses ever created on the bases that our elastic dresses were the only ones that actually worked.

At the back of our minds, however, there was a sense that we had not achieved fully, what we had set out to do. We wondered if it was possible to create a technique that looked better on women with more curves than on a woman with a model physique?

After carrying this around for a season we finally realised that to achieve our objective, we had to change the way we thought about body-con. We realised that to achieve our aim, we needed to stop looking for ways to compress or disguise but work with the body to create spectacular textures. The first wave of our new concepts comprise dresses embellished with thousands on individually sewn strips of elastic, which have the ability to move independently from each other. The result is the more curves a woman has the more interesting the textures and patterns she creates, especially when she is moving. These dresses look great on models but unbelievable on women of a greater dress size.

In fact, whilst we normally start our sizing at a UK6 and go up to the maximum size a design can take, be it a UK12 or 14. For this style we start at a UK8 and go up to a UK20, as this is the size range that can truly look amazing in these dresses.

After developing this method further, we will turn our attention to a couple of other ideas we had a while ago, both of which are concepts that have never been tried before.